How Does the U.S. Government Shutdown Affect the VanEck-SolidX Bitcoin ETF?

On Friday (January 18th), American lawyer Jake Chervinsky, who is highly-respected in the crypto community for his excellent commentaries on how U.S. securities laws affect companies that deal with cryptoassets, decided to focus his attention on the VanEck-SolidX Bitcoin ETF proposal and how its approval/denial may (or may not) be affected by the current U.S. government shutdown (which began on 22 December 2018).

Chervinsky, an associate at the Washington, D.C. office of prestigious international law firm Kobre & Kim, as usual, was expressing his personal opinions via his personal Twitter account, and it is important to note that his tweets do not reflect the views of any past/present/future employer/client and should not be viewed as legal/financial advice.

The reason that Chervisnky took to Twitter to comment on this particular Bitcoin ETF proposal and how it might be affected by the current government shutdown is that he had noticed on Twitter "a lot of confusion & misinformation about how the shutdown affects the SEC and its process for handling ETF proposals."

6/ But the SEC still has a small number of staff members available to handle "excepted" functions, which mostly refers to urgent law enforcement matters, but also includes "activities necessary for a short period in order to ensure an orderly shutdown of operations."

The SEC gets to make that designation for itself, and I'm willing to bet it thinks preventing controversial financial products like bitcoin ETFs from being auto-approved due to blown deadlines is "necessary."

10/ The staff shortage means the order might have less detail than usual. Maybe it's one page saying "[approved/denied] for reasons to be explained later." Or maybe it was written weeks ago & is totally standard.

But what if Chervinsky is wrong about his assumption that the SEC's "skeleton crew" will deal with the business of issuing an approval/disapproval order for this ETF proposal? Chervinsky, says, that if he is wrong, then one of two things must have happened, and explains what each of these scenarios means:

11/ If I'm wrong (it's possible), then one of two things has happened:

#1: the SEC decided to approve the ETF anyway & preferred to allow auto-approval than to issue an order of approval during a shutdown.

#2: the SEC couldn't keep its skeleton crew on board to issue a denial.

14/ On page 18, the operations plan talks about proposed rule changes. It says the SEC will discontinue "review and approval of applications for registration . . . with respect to new financial products."

He concludes his commentary on the VanEck-SolidX Bitcoin ETF proposal by saying that contrary to what seems to be popular opinion, the current government shutdown cannot possibly improve the chances of this proposal getting approved by the SEC:

16/ Don't get me wrong: the ETF could still be approved, especially if the SEC made its decision before the shutdown started.

All I'm saying is that the shutdown doesn't improve the ETF's chances of approval at all. In fact, the opposite is probably true.

As for the Bakkt's proposed Bitcoin (BTC) futures contract and the trading platform that will allow buying and selling of this new product, Chervinsky explains why the government shutdown will not influence the